I worked on three projects this week for my digital imaging class.

Excercise:

submit thumbnail sketches of at least three ideas you have come up with as possible solutions for the course composite project for group discussion. Use this assignment as an opportunity to pitch and storyboard your ideas. Include your ideas for digital imagery, head, body copy, logo, and slogan. Combine your three thumbnail sketches onto 1 canvas with 3 sections (set canvas size 900wx400h). Photoshop is recommended but you may use a medium that you feel most comfortable. If you use pencil and paper, you must scan in and then resize appropriately.

1. Use your drawing tablet, or collage, sketch or create a digital montage. Communicate your ideas!
2. Draw at least 3 concepts.

Combine and submit the 3 sketches in JPEG format.

My son understood what I was trying to do with two of the concepts. He is five so hopefully, any of these concepts will work for the general public. He was like “mom, the cow is going into the spaceship! and “Look, the cow is jumping over that moon!”. The ice cream moon of course.

Concept #1 is a cow jumping over the moon. It takes the childhood nursery rhyme to a new generation theme. The cow on a pogo stick jumps over the moon made of a scoop of Jolly Humor’s Chocolate, Vanilla and Marshmallow flavor ice cream. The “Moon” appears to be glowing and I created this by using shadowing effects. I used an image of a starburst. I found a picture of a cow jumping on a pogo stick from some stockphoto images. I used text effects to make it appear that the “elevate your moo’d!” was like the smoke trails from the cow’s pogo stick.

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Concept #2 is a little different. I am asking a hypothetical question of what degree will people go to adjust their mood. It is poking fun at the idea that cows are abducted for science experiments and at the slogan of elevating moods. I am trying to give the impression through the picture that Jolly Humor levitates their cows to get the mind altering effects from the ingredients used in Jolly Humor’s products. In the body of the ad, it says “Jolly Humor knows 100 other tasty ways to elevate your mood.” Then the word “other” is scratched out with a red script font to look like a marker with an edit mark and the word “scientifically proven” above the word. This refers to the scientifically proven ingredients that will make them feel better while comforting them. It is more realistic than the “abducted cow scenario” insinuated by the picture. This is also an ad to introduce the 100 new flavors, the type of ingredients, the new marketing campaign in a fun way. This one is my favorite and I hope it made you laugh.

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Concept #3 is an ad for the partnership with the Susan G. Komen foundation and breast cancer awareness. Because we are becoming a more globally conscious corporation of health and feeling better both inside and out, we have decided to give percentages of profits toward Grass root and non-profit organizations that help spread the awareness and medical funding for cancer research. I lost my mother to breast cancer 6 years ago and know from personal experience what a wonderful organization this is. This ad may not be identified with small children but it does identify with many women and their families and shows the serious and thought conscious side of Jolly Humor. It is putting forth a message that “Jolly Humor” cares about people and not just about their contribution to their wealth and success and they want to give the impression to their customers that they are giving back. Which in turn, when the customer is shopping and they have competitor brand A that is not doing anything to give back to the global community over Jolly Humor brand that is, well I am sure that a person who has been touched by the SGKF will purchase Jolly Humor brand over Brand A because they support SGKF.

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Digital Imaging Class Week one Assignment one

Exercise:

1. Find an unaltered photograph by searching the Web (look for an image that looks like it was shot with a camera).
2. Then find a similar but digitally altered image (an image that has been created or manipulated in a digital imaging program like Photoshop). For example: a photograph of a swan on a lake and another of a swan digitally placed on the rings of Saturn, or a shot of someone’s face compared to the same face digitally enhanced or manipulated in Photoshop.
3. Describe and identify the manipulated elements. How do you think the image was altered? What tools/techniques do you think were used? Which one you think is most effective and why. Include the links/URL for each image in your comparison.

Submission:

I did a digital images and art search in Google, as required for this assignment and found some great web sites that I thought I would share with the class. The Digital Artist (http://www.thedigitalartist.com/) is an online portfolio gallery that is centered toward marketing the artwork of several digital artists. It was created by Carol Pentleton. This site showcases the work of many artists and offers advice and tips to aid the digital artists in marketing and web presence. Another web site that I checked out was Art.Net (http://www.art.net/studios/digital.html) which also showcased portfolios of many talented artists.

For my image search, I used an image from my photobucket.com account. Here is the before image. http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii215/ohmniversedesigns/raw.jpg and here is the after image http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii215/ohmniversedesigns/ethan_5th_birthday.jpg. I thought I might as well use my own.
As you can see in the raw image, there were some improvements that needed to be made. I took this image with my digital camera and the size was 1024 x 769. I
transferred the image to my computer with the media slot (SD drive) through my SD card. I opened this photo in with Photoshop CS3. I wanted to remove all the extra background that I thought didn’t need to be in the picture and I couldn’t get rid of the cup in front of the cake without cutting out the cake (any suggestions here?). I used the crop tool to define the area that I wanted to keep in the picture. The biggest thing was the red eyes caused by the reflection of light in my son’s eyes from the flash of the camera. I used the red eye removal tool and used the zoom tool to increase the magnification of the image so that I could see the area I wanted to remove the red eye from better. After getting all the red out of his eye area, I increased the canvas 1 inch on each side of the photo and gave it a colored background of black. I decided to put a border around the image. I decided to use the diagonal line tool and increased the size to 10px. I used the color picker to change the color to match a shade of green in his birthday cake. I inserted 4 lines around the photo to box in and give the illusion of a border. I have downloaded several brush plug-ins and chose one that went along with his Buzz Light Year themed birthday party and cake. I chose a techno brush style. I used a shade of purple and red with the aid of the color picker for the brush color styles. I also used the same color green that I had chose for the border. I added a text line in the same shade of purple as the brush styles to write “Happy 5th Birthday Ethan!” and I chose a (can’t remember the name, sorry) font in the size of 24 pixel. I decided to change the image size and resolution for better web viewing. I changed the size to a 6 x 6 canvas or 569 wide by 493 pixels high with a resolution of 100. Then I went to file and used the “Save for Web” option to optimize my photo. I could have used GIF or JPEG as a file extension for this photo. Since it was a photo and I wasn’t concerned so much about the quality to print, I chose a JPEG at Maximum selection and saved my photo. This compressed my photo and changed the dpi to 96 which is the maximum suggested resolution for web viewing.

I decided that since I no longer have time to research the occult and conspiracies and what not because I am too busy with learning how to do web design and I don’t have time to do both. I thought I would share my class assignments. It is funny to see how much this stuff influences my work. I have the creative fever. It is like magick. I create things. I direct my will and I recreate emotion.

This is the stuff that is on my mind at present